From its opening credits, the Belgian-French animation Ernest & Celestine proclaims its hand-drawn, delicate, watercolour aesthetic. But it’s not all sweetness and light: there’s a dark strand of humour and some sly visual gags in this clever tale of opposites.

It’s a film of two worlds, above and below ground, and the stories that the inhabitants of these worlds tell about each other. Mice, who live underground, are told that they are nothing more than menu items to fierce, greedy bears. Above the surface, bears hear tales of fairy mice who bring coins to children in exchange for their lost teeth, but the creatures themselves are shunned.

Ernest & Celestine

Yet when an individual mouse and bear actually meet – the curious, resourceful Celestine and the shambling, solitary Ernest – friendship grows. But their friendship takes a difficult course.

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Mice, it turns out, are animal dentists (William Steig came up with a similar idea, used to very different ends, in his picture book Dr De Soto, which was made into an animated short). Ernest & Celestine is derived from a series of picture-books by Gabrielle Vincent, is directed by the creative team of Benjamin Renner, Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar (creators of the stop-motion comedy A Town Called Panic), and was nominated for an Oscar in 2013, although it never had much of a chance against the Frozen juggernaut.

It’s good when foreign-language animation releases give audiences the option to have a dubbed or a subtitled version, but there’s no choice on this occasion. The dubbed version, with strong voice work from Forest Whitaker and Mackenzie Foy as the title characters, plus the likes of Paul Giamatti and Lauren Bacall, is the only one that will be in local cinemas.